Joan Root, a painter/printmaker, and an art historian has taught painting and drawing as well as art history for more than forty years.  She lived and exhibited in New York before moving to Washington, DC.  In New York, she taught at The New York Academy of Art, The School for Visual Arts, Stern College, and New York University.  In Washington, she has been on the faculty of the Corcoran College of Art, Northern Virginia Community College, and American University.  In 2000, she spent four months as a Visiting Artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hanoi, Vietnam.  She has been a guest artist and instructor at the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Joan Root’s art is Contemporary Classicism and based on the visual representation of the world around us.  Her art has been exhibited in galleries in the United States and Europe (Italy, Great Britain, Poland, Slovenia).  Associated American Artists in New York commissioned one of her stone lithograph editions for national distribution.  Her works are found in the museum collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), The National Endowment for the Arts (Washington, DC), Portland Museum of Art, (Portland, Oregon), DeCordova Museum (Lincoln, Massachusetts), Dulin Gallery of Art (Knoxville, Tennessee) and others.  Her art is in many private collections in the US and Europe.  In May 2011, she had a one-person show at the Arts Club of Washington after more than twenty-five years exhibiting with the renown Franz Bader Gallery.

Joan Root has lectured at the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institute and the Kreeger Museum.  For the Smithsonian, she has led art history tours traveling throughout Italy, to the Baltics and St. Petersburg as well as to museums in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington.
She has brought the joy and wonder of art history as well as artists’ studio methods to audiences of all ages and backgrounds. Characterized by her unique abilities, Joan Root’s presentations bring art into people’s lives by unraveling some of its mysteries and demonstrating the materials and methods that artists use in the studio.  Her presentations open new opportunities to see and appreciate art.

She holds three graduate degrees:  M.A. in Art Education (City College of New York); Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Art History (American University, Washington, DC); M.A. in Printmaking (lithography and etching) with Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art History (Villa Schifanoia/Dominican University in Florence, Italy).  She was awarded a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship for her studies in Florence.

She has published articles on a wide range of artists from Raphael to Picasso.

In addition, Joan Root has been a popular lecturer for Seabourn and Silversea cruises on a wide spectrum of art topics ranging from the Classical Art of Greece and Rome to the Italian Renaissance, 19th century French, British, and American art and The Tropical Inspiration of the Caribbean.  She is well known for her signature series of twelve lectures “Artists’ Secrets:  Looking at Paintings with an Artist’s Eye” which has been presented at the National Gallery of Art and other locations.